The present invention relates generally integrated circuit devices and, more particularly, to on-chip measurement of AC variability in individual transistor devices, such as field effect transistors.
The aggressive scaling of transistor geometries to nanometer dimensions coupled with the growing die sizes has made it extremely difficult to maintain device uniformity while adjusting for the complex interactions between the numerous steps in the manufacturing process. The impact of these variations has been magnified with the scaling of design dimensions, since process tolerances do not scale proportionally, causing the relative impact of these variations to increase with each new technology generation. Variations in process-induced parameters can result in significant differences in the threshold voltage of devices, altering their characteristics and performance. Device variability can be caused by process and lithography imperfections, as well as uncontrollable factors such as random dopant fluctuations.
As a result, there is variation over different geometric length scales, such as lot-to-lot differences, across wafer variation, across-chip variation and local mismatch. The local mismatch is the most difficult to measure and control, as it requires substantial measurement to detect statistically significant variation in nearby devices.
Accurate characterization and measurement of local variation in threshold voltage of closely spaced devices is essential for process optimization, yield enhancement and design of analog circuits in current technologies. Threshold variation is a particularly acute problem for low supply voltage and subthreshold logic circuits. Historically, characterization has been achieved through determination of current-voltage (I-V) curves of similar adjacent devices, each connected to measurement pads. Recently, multiplexing multiple devices to pads has greatly increased the number of devices which can be measured, but requires significant data analysis, in addition to accurate current measurement. The results of such measurements are regarded as direct current (DC) characteristics.
In contrast, there is a need to measure the time-dependent response of devices to transient changes of the voltages applied to devices. This can be regarded as alternating current (AC), high-frequency, or time-domain characterization. Ring oscillator-based circuits have been frequently used to characterize AC variability statistics, but they provide an average over perhaps hundreds of devices, and NFETs and PFETs are averaged together. Some other approaches require the generation of process-invariant bias voltages, which increases the area penalty and design complexity.